Hacker News Reader

mrduncanon Ask HN: Who's hiring non-developer/designer positions?

From the jobs page: Justin.tv is looking for a Head of Communications - http://www.justin.tv/jobs#communications

[I don't work there, just remembered seeing it on the front-page a couple of days ago]

mrduncanon Ask HN: Should I Learn Ruby?

The largest websites/web applications in the world are built in Rails much more frequently than in Django.

While we're calling each other out for citations, that's an awfully big statement to make without citations as well.

Let's just put it this way: Both frameworks power large sites, you pretty much can't go wrong with either.

mrduncanon The Turn (1993)

The F-86 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRt6UnNzR6I

mrduncanon Cassandra at Twitter Today

On a small scale, yes. On Twitter scale (in February they were averaging 50 million tweets/day [1]), it's probably not so simple.

[1] http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html

Edit: As of mid June, it was about 65 million per day.

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/big-goals-big-game-big-recor...

mrduncanon Partial Deployment with Feature Switches

It seems like every company has their own implementation of these - are there any open source versions? I'm strongly contemplating throwing together a gem for rails this weekend.

EDIT:

I found http://github.com/bvandenbos/redis_feature_control which handles features globally (either on or off for everyone). Unfortunately doesn't handle things on a per user/session/etc basis though - although it shouldn't be too hard to add that feature using Redis sets.

mrduncanon Request HN: Please all update contact info in your profile

Reminder: The email field is only visible to mods, not other users. If you want your email to be visible to other users, add it to your "about".

mrduncanon Fake - Mac OS X Web Browser Automation and Webapp Testing Made Simple.

Not that I think the name is that great, but "fake" in this context is used to mean that the app can fake things.

mrduncanon Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL

Jeff Dean (for those wondering): http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html

mrduncanon Google to use HTML5 in Gmail

I believe that Gmail predates GWT.

I'd imagine that GWT also isn't as fast or compact as they'd like for Gmail.

mrduncanon Need best Javascript books suggestion

On a related note, http://www.jslint.com/ (written by Crockford) is a fantastic tool to keep your JavaScript clean.

Crockford also has some interesting articles at: http://javascript.crockford.com/

mrduncanon Insightful talk by Gary Vaynerchuk - "Crush It" author

For those who haven't seen a talk by Gary V before, be prepared for plenty of cursing.

Also, he can be a little off-putting at first - give it a chance, you'll be glad you did.

mrduncanon I am now homeless - living on Airbnb for months

Ideally, it'd balance out.

Most of the time, you'd rent a small place (thereby saving money as compared to an apartment). When you needed something else, you'd simply get a more expensive place for a few days, the extra costs would be balanced out by having those smaller places most of the time.

mrduncanon Nomadic: Zipcar for apartments, for people who only need the Internet to work.

That pretty much describes AirBnB (or CouchSurfing if you take out the free rent).

mrduncanon Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

Well said.

Anecdotally, I've never had issues with tickets that had my partial name on them in the past either ("Matt" vs. "Matthew") although this may have changed now that TSA requires full names and birthdays (I always use my full name now).

mrduncanon SpaceX signs largest single commercial launch deal ever -- $492 million

He was probably referring to the number of Lloyds insured satellites in orbit.

mrduncanon Javascript and CSS best practices for better performance

In other words: Do you really think that you can write this piece of javascript better than John Resig? (substitute authors as necessary)

In some cases, yes, but I'd argue that in most cases probably not.

mrduncanon Profitable & Proud: Shopify

If it's tough to fake in small groups, why not just split people into groups. For example, only people who work directly with each other can reward them. Obviously that's a little bit of an oversimplification but I don't see why such a split couldn't be made to work.

mrduncanon Notice: We're turning off the YC application form at 10pm Pacific

I'm curious - how many at this point (if any) have been funded which were submitted late?

mrduncanon Airbnb has 20 job openings

They also were funded by Sequoia Capital last year.

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/10/25/sequoia-capit...

mrduncanon Ask HN: Hacker Hobbies?

Here is an Op-Ed in the NYTimes I managed to dig up written by Buffett's partner Sharon Osberg:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/opinion/27osberg.html

mrduncanon Ask HN: Hacker Hobbies?

Based on a CNBC special I saw a year or two ago, I believe Warren Buffett is also regular bridge player.

mrduncanon Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records

There really isn't any motivation to shut it down now though as far as I can tell. It seems like they're getting money with essentially no strings attached - might as well get it now while it's easy to get.

mrduncanon Challenge HN: A reference implementation of HN on different platforms?

I've noticed recently that writing a simple Twitter clone has become almost the new Hello World (or the next step). These all obviously have differing numbers of features and polish but that might be a good starting point also.

mrduncanon My company: 5 months work from home, one month work in a 5 star hotel

I assume you're talking about the US (apologies if you aren't) - interest is not a protected class.

The following are protected groups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

I'll also state the obvious here - I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't trust legal advice you receive on the internet.

mrduncanon $10 Million Round For Ruby On Rails Startup Heroku (YC W08)

In case you (or others) weren't aware, they also introduced experimental support for Node.js a couple of weeks ago.

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_ex...

mrduncanon Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

They appear to be working on some sort of fix right now.

If you look at "following" lists, everything is showing up as zero for me right now, as in it shows that I'm not following anyone. All other users that I check are also showing that they aren't following anyone.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Who's Hiring?

Just wanted to say that I've met most of the folks at Airbnb and they are all unbelievably awesome. Seriously check them out, they're doing some amazing things.

mrduncanon Thoughts on Flash

Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5

If I remember correctly, iTunes isn't Cocoa based yet either.

mrduncanon Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead

I believe that there is a time limit on the duplicate check, that way items can be re-posted after some time has passed. I'd guess it's probably 30 days.

For those wondering, here is the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1201079

mrduncanon Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead

I posted this about a month ago, didn't seem to get much interest then unfortunately. In any case, here is a link to the actual thesis:

"The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis." - http://www.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/students/dunlop/2009-CDOme...